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Productivity Commission draft report on public infrastructure

11 April 2014

The Productivity Commission should not support the Heavy Vehicle Charging and Investment (HVCI) Reform process, the ATA’s submission to the Productivity Commission inquiry into public infrastructure says.

Through HVCI, governments are working on a proposal to impose mass-distance-location pricing on trucking operators. Operators would be required to fit regulatory GPS devices to their trucks, and would be sent invoices based on the distances their trucks travelled, the roads they used and a measure of their mass.

HVCI’s proposal would greatly increase the cost of transporting freight in rural and regional areas, because roads in these locations are built to a lighter standard than major highways. To meet the cost of road wear, charges for local roads in rural areas would need to be 25 times higher than the charges for freeways,” the ATA submission says.

“The ATA has recommended to the Commonwealth Treasury and other government organisations that HVCI should be disbanded since the outcomes of its recommendations will increase the cost of transporting freight, increase costs in rural Australia, add extra administration costs to trucking businesses, and not provide improvements in road provision.”

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